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100 Years Ago: Women's Day (1910-2010)
Socialist Women Declare a Global Feminist Holiday
by Megan Cornish
Global Research, March 8, 2010
In the process of accomplishing their own liberation, women will be
essential to the liberation of humanity.
Women are a revolutionary force. That fact shows in their holiday,
International Women's Day (IWD), both its past and present. Because the
profit system depends on the second-class status of women, the day that
honors them is bound to be connected to momentous happenings.
There were at least 984 events last year in 64 countries. The day is an
official holiday in 29 countries - not accidentally, mostly those with
an anti-capitalist history. They include China, Cuba, Vietnam, states in
the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and some in Africa.
The wealthier nations - North American and European countries, Australia
- don't recognize it. It's notable that both IWD and May Day, the
international workers' holiday, were started to commemorate the
struggles of workers in the U.S. - but neither is recognized officially
in the heart of Capital.
A militant beginning. The holiday's roots are in the struggles of
working women and their socialist supporters. It's believed that a mass
protest by women garment and textile workers in New York City in 1857
occurred on March 8, and that in March two years later the same women
won a drive to unionize. They were fighting against brutal working
conditions, low wages, and the 12-hour day.
On March 8, 1908, socialist women organized a demonstration of 15,000 in
New York. Their demands were pay raises, shorter hours, the vote, and an
end to child labor. After that, the Socialist Party of America decided
to celebrate a women's day in the U.S., the first of which was held in
1909.
International Women's Day was founded the following year, a century ago,
at the Second International Socialist Women's Conference held alongside
the International Socialist Congress in Copenhagen, Denmark. The
attendees represented socialist parties, working women's clubs, and
unions, and included the first three women elected to the Finnish
parliament, at a time when few women had the right to vote.
U.S. delegates went intending to propose an international women's day,
only to find that German feminist Clara Zetkin had beaten them to it.
Zetkin was a prominent member of the German socialist party, which had a
strong history of defending women's rights. Women from 17 countries
voted unanimously to create the holiday. The next year, 1911,
celebrations started with a bang, with more than a million people
demonstrating in Germany, Austria, Denmark and Switzerland.
The need for such a day got a chilling but powerful push from the great
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 25, 1911, in New York. Locked
exits and poor safety measures caused the deaths of 146 workers, mostly
women. It became an international scandal that ignited labor organizing.
It helped build the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, which
was one of the first primarily female unions and became one of the
largest unions in the U.S.
In 1913 and 1914, as the drumbeats for World War I were beginning to
sound, major IWD demonstrations calling for peace took place in Europe.
World War I began in August 1914. For several years, IWD was suppressed
both by capitalist governments and by some socialist parties, those that
had betrayed international working-class solidarity by backing their own
nations in the war.
A revolutionary spark. But the most momentous IWD so far was in Russia
on March 8, 1917. The story is told magnificently in Leon Trotsky's
History of the Russian Revolution. Women started the insurrection that
overthrew the all-powerful czar - and led to the Bolshevik revolution
eight months later.
Women textile workers in Petersburg were desperate and angry because of
severe food shortages and the slaughter of several million Russian
soldiers in the war. They went on strike, and called on other factories
to support them. The strike and demonstrations grew from day to day, and
five days later, the Russian monarchy was gone for good.
Ongoing insurgency. IWD isn't just a ceremonial occasion. In Iran in
2007, police violently broke up an IWD protest and arrested dozens of
women. The day has a militant history in Iran.
On IWD in 1979, in the midst of the revolution that ousted the
U.S.-backed shah, and just after the right-wing Islamic regime of
Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, 100,000 women and male supporters
rallied at Tehran University. Then 20,000 women, wearing western clothes
instead of the mandated full-length veil, marched through the city.
Protests were organized in other cities, too. Women demanded equal
rights, including the right to dress as they wished. Religious
vigilantes dispersed the women, although they fought back over the
course of several days. It was the failure of left parties to defend the
women that led to the ultimate defeat of the revolution.
Female leadership is a high-water mark in struggles too numerous to
count. Women workers were instrumental in nationalizing banks during the
uncompleted Portuguese revolution in 1977. Women played a vital role in
Latin American upheavals of the 1980s, including Nicaragua's Sandinista
rebellion. Europe in the '80s saw a huge upsurge of feminism,
particularly within socialist and communist parties.
Last year, women played a forefront role in the uprising in Honduras
against the coup that ousted the democratically elected president,
Manuel Zelaya.
In the U.S., the huge feminist movement launched in the late 1960s began
with radical aims. Despite the achievement of some reforms and a sea
change in social attitudes, those aims remain to be fulfilled - as they
do in the rest of the world.
The dynamism and revolutionary role of women workers that IWD
commemorates is a key to understanding our times. Revolts by those on
the bottom against the crimes of the profit system spring up
continually. And those on the bottom are women, of all colors and
nationalities and sexual persuasions, and as the most downtrodden part
of every other oppressed group.
In the process of accomplishing their own liberation, women will be
essential to the liberation of humanity.
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This article was First published by Freedom Socialist Party - 2010-02-01
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